Claude Spencer: Resident rich pretty boy, Claude loves the finer things (including flying and boating) and made sure to buy a gross amount of random, hi-tech doodads that might help the group in the base.

Carmine “Big Time” Azzarello: The loveable Carmine runs a fairly large supers dedicated blog. Due to his love of superheroes and the internet he heard about “base raiding” well before most people did. Equipped with some rations, a baseball bat, a headset camera, and a replica domino mask Carmine wants nothing more than to “accidentally” become a superhuman.

Uisce “Fish” Beatha (Pronounced Ish-kay): Carmine and Claude don’t know what Uisce is. Despite knowing this person for their entire lives no one has ever asked if Uisce is a he or a she. Growing up in a large, criminally-oriented Irish family taught Uisce a lot about lockpicking, sneaking around, and shooting. Uisce pocketed his/her father’s .38 revolver before heading out to meet at the base.

The group originally found the base while on a camping trip in the mountains. During a lightning storm a stray bolt struck something in the ground close to their tent. The next morning they found a hatch made of a strange metal that led below ground. The lightning bolt fried the electronic lock, which caused the dormant hatch to open. The kids decided cover the hatch and come back next weekend to properly investigate.

Overall we had a LOT of fun playing. I decided to roll random powers on the Superpower Wiki and put them in the game in some way. I wanted a healthy mix of power sources and ended up with:1. Liquid Transformation: Can turn liquids from one thing to another (like Water to Wine). Came in the form of a clear fluid cocktail made from diluted alien blood. No one chose to take this power because you had to inject it. Everyone was REALLY squeamish when it came to needles.

2. Speed Cancellation: The ability to negate movement (including super speed, though this strains the device). Came in the form of a modified Ideal Stun Cannon used by a powerful human soldier who worked with the Ideal (Cpt. Winter). He was right on the cusp of “Is he or isn’t he a superhero?” and no one has seen him since Ragnarok. Attaches at the wrist and folds out into a Megaman-esque armcannon. Seen on Carmine in the picture but later given to Fish after gaining…

3. Copper Mimicry: A solid orb of copper was held in a stasis bubble in a repair bay. Fish thought it would be a good idea to undo the stasis and touch the orb because she had yet to get a superpower that didn’t involved injecting a needle into herself. The orb fell apart like sand. Turns out it was actually a nanoswarm that burrowed into her bones, muscles, and skin. His new shiny copper body scared him at first. She attempted to return her skin to normal but could only make his face return to flesh. When the Speed Cancellation ISC was attached to Fish’s body they melded with the cannon as well, allowing Fish to fire copper flechette and turning it a interesting silvery/copper color.

4. Weapon Hands: A symbiotic purple parasite that can absorb mundane weapons and tools. The user can then transform their hands into a chitinous nightmare version of one of these held weapons. Found on a skeleton in a hardlight jail cell. Only the fleshy tendrils of the symbiote remained on the bones. Carmine tripped and fell on to the skeleton and the alien creature quickly attached itself to him.

5. Elemental Blade (Lightning): A blue crystal from another plane of existence that can be grasped to create a crackling blade. Used by Carmine and then given to Claude.

6. Psychic Bomb Generation: By entering a machine that performs a brain modification (read: automated open brain surgery and drugs) Carmine gained the ability to create small psychic grenades and other explosives. Unfortunately, this power came with the side-effect of intense headaches and pain in the finger joints unless bombs were generated and released (read: you must explode things).

7. Strength Manipulation: A needle labeled “Strength Giver.” Not super-strength as the kids originally thought. When injected with this failed super-soldier serum the subject would gain the ability to instill great strength in others with a simple touch. Because it was a needle the players thought I was doing something evil and didn’t use it.

8. Electroreception/Electric Speed: I rolled Electroreception and then rolled Electric Speed one after the other so I decided to combine them. By reading passages of this grimoire you bind an extraplanar entity of electricity to your nervous system. The plus side is that you can now sense things around you as if they were part of your nervous system AND your legs tingle with electricity which, when released, grants to bursts of great speed. The downside is, you bound an extraplanar entity to your nervous system and it’s going to make some suggestions on what it thinks you should do in the future. Claude, resident idiot, decided to read the book because he was bored.

In addition they found some mundane things. Fish can be seen wearing a mesh undersuit that they believed might have been the base layer worn under a suit of power armor, some tranq guns, and a bulletproof vest. As for the flashlight… face… thing, Carmine’s player loves superheroes and is great at improv. It was a piece of officially licensed memorabilia for Starlight Siren. Also it could scream if you pressed a button. Similarly, the fish head/mask was a replica of the mask used by Manfried Manfish from ’98 to ’03. The weird crotch thing is a censor blur to conceal Fish’s gender in the skintight undersuit. We all got a kick out of the joke.

The base itself was an Ideal facility known as “The Vault.” The general idea was that the base was autonomous and staffed almost entirely by robotic personnel. Unknown materials of all manner were sent to the Vault for preliminary testing. The one superhero in the Vault would then decide if things should be stored, destroyed, or sent to another facility. So when Ragnarok came around quite a few things were left unsorted.

Most importantly was the system that ran the Vault. A skilled technopath whose body was broken in a battle with a supervillain volunteered to have his brain installed in a supercomputer which ran the vast majority of the robots and store vital information. In the event of his death or disappearance much of the data would go with him. The technopath got along quite well with the other hero stationed at the base but both vanished during Rangarok. The players found it very strange that the supervillain in the jail cell with the Weapon Hand Symbiote would remain while the brain in the jar was taken. In true Base Raiders fashion I just shrugged at them and went “Who knows?”

Name: Steven Nettles
Nationality: American
Race:
DOB:
DOD: –
Height: 5’8
Weight: 180 lbs
Appearance: He looks like a grizzled 40’s detective.
Known Superhuman Abilities: Shows up unexpectedly and tends to survive in spite of the odds. “I need a Hero” and other “thematic” music seems to play more often than it should on the radio when he is around, it tends to jam nearby communications, also sometimes a weird voice can be heard describing things just before or after these broadcasts.

History: Steven is a teenage product of a broken household. In a way he is an everyman for the current generation. He is exceptionally empathetic, which may or may not be the reason why “The Narrator” chose him as its Psion.

“The Plot” is an Extradimensional Entity / Eldritch Horror that wishes to control all reality and use it for entertainment by continuously creating clashes between “Good” and “Evil”, “White” and “Black”, “Blue” and “Orange”. If it has its way it will abolish all free will in the universe and we won’t even know that it had happened. It has a hard time interacting with our reality directly, so it created “The Narrator” to act as a go between (like we use a screwdriver as a go between for our hands and a screw). Be warned, “The Plot” enjoys a wide array of genres from tragedy to high adventure to alien concepts we don’t have names for yet.

“The Narrator” is a servant of “The Plot.” It seeks to manipulate people into dramatic conflict. It gathers information and uses it to providing motivation for its various pawns to fight one another (or just other groups).

The Ideal put strong wards in place that held the Narrator in check, preventing it from communicating with mortals and therefor limiting the damage it could do. Those wards are fraying and when the stars are right, he can push past the wards and tune into our reality’s cosmic radio frequency.

“Heroically” is defined as entertaining “The Plot.” Villains can act “Heroically” for this purpose, so long as it is high drama or leads to high drama, usually.

Aspects
Super Soldier: Can hear the voice of the narrator.
Background: The Show must go on!
Conviction: I have to live up to the Hype.
Aspect: Isn’t that a little… meta?
Aspect: Live fast and leave a good looking corpse.
Aspect: Learn three things man wasn’t meant to know before breakfast.
Complication [MInor]: Existential Ennui
Complication [Major]: Tropes made manifest

Examine + Unusual : The Narrator + Range, Information + Unusual: The Plot, Research + Unusual: The Plot (3-2-4)
Initiative [Physical] (2)
Notice + Unusual (1-0-1)
Cost: 10 skill points (6 trappings, 2 connections, 5 Extras, -3 drawback)
Description: You can hear the things the narrator says (as far as you are concerned, the narrator is a disembodied voice that only you can hear). (This isn’t actually the D.M. and while it thematically “breaks the 4th wall” it really doesn’t). If the Narrator wants you to find a clue he will often say something like “and the hero found a clue in the villain’s desk!” Giving you an idea where to look. If he is being very kind, he might warn you of ambushes before they happen, by announcing “And unbeknownst to the hero! He was walking strait into an ambush!” If you don’t actually DO the things he says, he can become upset or sullen. He may warn you of an ambush, but he wants you to walk into it anyway. If you choose not to search the desk for the clue he wanted you to have, he might say things like “and the hero decided after two weeks, TO GO BACK TO THE DESK AND FIND THE BLOODY CLUE!” or move along to another plot thread. You can hear it even if you go deaf.

You don’t own the narrator. It talks when it wants to. It exists independently of you.

The Hover Office of Doctor Skull
Flying skull shaped fortress, full of traps and bots, PCs can get to it on its’ Montana resupply stop.

Doctor Skull was a more classic super villain, he possessed no powers but built an impressive array of robotics and other devices. His henchmen were generally recruited from the weaker class of thugs and then given strength enhancing power armor though much less powerful than his own iconic skull armor*. He clashed with Crusher, the super strong hero of Oregon often but vanished about two years before Ragnarok.

*The chest plate is a giant skull (the eyes are flamethrowers) the shoulder pads are skulls, the knee pads are skulls, the helmet is a skull, the belt buckle is a skull, the kneepads are skulls, the shoes are elongated skulls, the gloves are skulls with the fingers being the teeth. He also wore a red cape with a black skull on it.

Short story, he got Alzheimer and died in his lab midway through his research on a cure, his body still roams his fortress in an automated power suit.

The long story, about five years ago Dr. Skull – Peter Jessep – self diagnosed with Alzheimer disease. He spent a few years learning about the disease and making sure it wasn’t something someone had done to him. Then he began working on a cure. The easiest way to get test subjects that fit his needs was to clone himself and he did that industrially. There is a hidden mass grave in Montana. But he was progressing slowly. During this time he also set his bases to full automation and fired his henchmen. One of his henchmen sold him out to Crusher who invaded. The two had a long talk and Crusher left the Doctor to his studies with the promise that all his research would go public.

So life went on, the Ideal lost interest in looking for and tracking the giant radar resistant skull fort and Jessep deteriorated faster than he thought. In the end he died in his power armor. However at this point even his armor was fully automated. So for the last two years, every morning it gets up, carries the corpse to the breakfast room, after half an hour it takes him to his lab where it idles without command until lunch, then off to the control deck for an hour and back to the lab until dinner. After that the armor walks to the study, sits next to a box of cigars and pours an empty bottle of red wine into a dirty wine glass while the sunset fills the room. Then it runs a clean cycle on the corpse and walks him to bed.

The base keeps going, the bots lurk, their programming more of a flowchart than AI. Each month about 20 clones pop awake trapped in tubes, they are physically healthy but their minds riddled with dementia and Alzheimer’s. They generally dehydrate or starve in their own filth before being dumped into the mass grave site. The Doctor’s spirit is tethered to his body and similarly feeble until the link is severed.